This is all very well but blockchain entries can only be created as fast as miners create solutions and eventually somebody is going to realise their “entry” in the chain will only be finalised the year after next assuming the activity queue holds up long enough.
Balance this against the fact that miner’s return drops progressively by design as the chain length grows…draw your own conclusion.
You are mixing up Blockchain with Bitcoin. There is no mining, just blockchain.
You may be right about mixing the two but irrespective of that there has to be a mechanism for associating a given blockchain entry with a notable event and that mechanism is what I meant to refer to. Otherwise the blockchain is a stateless list of committed timestamps proving nothing.
If I claim to have paid you (or my tax) at 10:15am today, how is this provable? Just saying “Blockchain!” is about as useful as ABRACADABRA without incorporating some kind of signature calculation.
My guess is that there will be interested parties with the right security access who can receive a copy of the entire chain to do their own verification, security, offline backup, etc. If their copy doesn’t match, alarm bells will ring.
I’m excited to learn the exact implementation details when that’s available, a non-cryptocurrency/power hungry widespread implementation is needed to prove the technology and disassociate with Bitcoin.
There are around a thousand different crypto currencies floating around at the moment. They all operate a bit different from each other. They’re each trying to establish themselves as occupying some niche purpose.
It’s best to judge each one according to the niche it occupies.
Bitcoin, the original or gen 1 crypto currency, after much community dispute resolution, looks like being a lower transaction rate, higher value. Think of it like digital gold bullion. You don’t buy a coffee with bars of gold.
Chicago Mercantile Exchange just opened a futures market for Bitcoin. That’s about as real as it gets in finance markets.
Ethereum, a gen 2 crypto currency, operates on proof of stake rather than proof of work, so doesn’t have the massive overheads of Bitcoin, though it still seems to have scaling issues (as recently revealed by “crypto kitties” - look it up). It’s also functions as a programming language on the block chain, enabling fully distributed executable business agreements as code. This is a huge deal, but with much complexity to resolve over time.
IOTA is a gen 3 crypto currency. It doesn’t even use block chain, instead using a new system called a Tangle. It has zero transaction fees, open ended scale-ability with linear increasing capacity as nodes are added. It’s niche is microtransactions suitable for internet-of-things scale activity. As little heard of as it may be to you, it currently has a market capitalisation of around $15 Billion.
The banks have their own thing because they want to oust their own middle man in the form of Swift. Last I heard, that’s probably Ripple.
The collective stock exchanges of the world own their own settlement agent, who announced about a year ago that they were making their own block chain solution for inter exchange settlement, “before someone else does”.
Oh, and forgot to mention what you might actually buy your coffee with. Likely candidates look like Litecoin or Bitcoin-Cash (forked off the original Bitcoin in August).
PPAU should also consider the privacy gains possible in crypto currency as it opposed government trends toward eliminating cash , thereby increasing the resolution of their surveillance of every damned thing we do.
I suppose it would be entirely possible to run a stock market with cryptocurrency but I don’t think that the ASX are looking to do that, they only want to run the ledger itself on a closed blockchain.
Have you seen the current price of LTC? It is rapidly leaving the realm of something you’d use to buy coffee with.
Time for Dogecoin to shine!
Uh, it’s not like you have to spend whole number units of these things. The issue when buying coffee is transaction cost and speed.
It’s about inter exchange settlement today.
But that still means it has to follow all the transactions.
So the likely candidates are Ripple and Iota, then. Speaking of which, I should probably check them over thoroughly for investment since they seem to solve the transaction capacity issue.
True, but it also depends on how much of the fractions you can spend on transaction fees without being either penalised or ending up paying more in the fee than the transaction is worth.
Either are likely to be ok investment, but in terms of target market, they have independent focus.
Ripple serves the banking sector, doing business deals aimed at solving their banking efficiency and security needs. Good strategy, but not likely to be something they ever accept at your coffee shop.
IOTA could potentially be your coffee buying coin given its features, but business focus is IoT today and probably for some time, while LTC and BCC are taking market share as cash equivalents with tiny fees.
Average transaction fee on $5 cuppa coffee eqv in BCC today would be about $aud0.07.
In IOTA, it’s $0.00, now and forever.
Similar to other 3rd gen coin, like maybe EOS. Don’t know enough about that one yet. Might be an Ethereum Challenger.
You’re missing the point. If a cryptocurrency has inherent limits to the number of transactions the network can process (eg Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, BCC) then in the long term it cannot be used as the proverbial coffee shop currency.
The first scalable cryptocurrency to get non-trivial marketshare will likely win as actual currency. Especially if it starts getting used for bridging purposes. The popular coins that preceeded will be treated as asset value stores.
(I’m still kicking myself for not following the implications of all this years ago.)
Just going to disagree with you on this one I think.
Vendors will decide, and they will move like a herd. First mover advantage means the first coin that takes sufficient market share by making the right deals with the right vendor groups and just being good enough will probably win. Consumers will follow for convenience and security.
Understanding how this works will answer all your “Why the fuck are we still using technology X?” questions.
If you cite the VHS vs Betamax case, the thread officially ends. 
Ha ha. Guess who was the A.B.C. intern who did (some of their) raw comparative quality tests summer of '82?
I completely agree? The problem I’m pointing to is how the various networks scale in transactions per second. Bitcoin can handle several orders of magnitude fewer than one of the big credit card companies, despite all the computation power being thrown at it, which means it can never dominate as an everyday-use currency. Cryptocurrencies that don’t scale well are not good enough.